The HURD was meant to be the true kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. The promise behind the HURD was revolutionary -- a set of daemons on top of a microkernel that was intended to surpass the performance of the monolithic kernels of traditional Unix systems and in doing so, give greater security, freedom and flexibility to the users -- but it has yet to come down to earth.

Red Hat invested quite a bit in Linux and then Oracle came along and offered support for RHEL at half price. This actually caused their stock to drop a while back.

What a truly splendid business. A company like Red Hat invests in Linux and a massive corp like Oracle can come along and undermine their profits without improving the software.

But this only proves my point. Oracle CAN do like this with Linux. It would not be possible to do like this with Apple OS X or Windows. This possibility is the sole reason Linux attracts lots of business people: you can easily make money out of Linux.

I am not saying this is good, but I am saying this opportunity draws attention from lots of business men who wants easy money. (Personally, I dont like this at all).

But seriously. Why would a business man NOT sell something that lot of engineers has put a lot of hard work into? It is free! Let someone else (the hard working nerds and geeks that gladly code for peanuts) take the R & D cost. You just brand it as a package and sell it.